


broken, fragile, lonely

by eyemoji



Category: Wolf 359 (Radio)
Genre: Canon Compliant, M/M, ai's nighttime dailies continue, an experiment in minimalism, i just started and...it went somewhere?, love these boys, why does that sound familiar
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-28
Updated: 2017-07-28
Packaged: 2018-12-07 21:48:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,090
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11632590
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/eyemoji/pseuds/eyemoji
Summary: a story in three parts.





	broken, fragile, lonely

**i.**

 

the first time he kisses him, his eyes are closed tight.

 

his lips are soft, and gentle against eiffel’s and eiffel tilts his head back to allow him more access as he moves to his neck, warm and slow and wet and _god_ , there’s a reason why this is, by all accounts, illegal. kepler wouldn’t like it. kepler won’t like it. _kepler won’t find out,_ he reasons, _if_ _you play your cards right._

 

_ there’s a reason he’s strategic intelligence, _ his mind tries to reason,  _ but then, so are you.  _ they should cancel each other out, strategic meets strategic means no intelligence, an unstoppable force against the immovable object-- jacobi pushes all this away.  _ enjoy what you have, _ he reminds himself. 

 

eiffel isn’t breathing quite so heavily, and jacobi realizes that he’s pulled away just the tiniest bit, is gazing at him with a strange mixture of awe and concern and  _ want _ in his eyes. it’s this last bit jacobi plays to as he spins them a hundred and eighty degrees to pin eiffel against the wall, presses himself right up against his torso ( _ bless microgravity, _ ) and moves his lips down eiffel’s partly unzipped flight suit to rest against his collarbone, hot against jacobi’s teeth as he bites down just the tiniest amount, drawing a surprised gasp from eiffel as he melts under him.

 

_ enjoy it while it lasts. _

 

**ii.**

 

the next time is unremarkable, except perhaps for the fact that they don’t get caught. so is the next. and the next. and a bunch more times after that. and then, it happens. it comes, of course, from eiffel.  _ kepler was right, _ jacobi thinks, in a voice that isn’t nearly as scornful as he’d intended, _ he  _ **_is_ ** _ weak. _

 

“i love you,” eiffel mumbles, into jacobi’s hair as they lie next to each other. by all traditional ways of keeping time, it’s night, but wolf 359 is as bright as ever, its ghostly blue light illuminating eiffel’s cheekbones and eiffel’s haunted eyes and eiffel’s blasphemous lips as he whispers the confession into the hollow clutches of jacobi’s curls.

 

jacobi doesn’t respond at first, though whether that’s because he doesn’t want to or because his heart has stopped as cleanly as if some well-meaning samaritan had used the AED on the wrong person, hell if he knows. isn’t that what eiffel is? a man with a good heart and all the wrong luck, planting a poison thorn of a promise when he thinks he’s sowing rose seeds in the barren garden that is jacobi? his throat clenches in on himself as he opens his mouth to speak, that traitorous muscle; or perhaps it isn’t; maybe the only thing saving jacobi from mutually assured destruction is the thick silence oozing from his vocal chords. but he clears his throat. and he speaks.

 

“no, you don’t.”

 

eiffel rolls over onto his back. the star traces a path along his jaw and disappears under the covers, a path jacobi is suddenly filled with the urge to take again.  _ mine,  _ he thinks, as he bridges the short gap between them to capture eiffel’s lips in what has become an all-too-familiar pattern.

 

**iii.**

 

some days are less hopeful. they wear masks of ice and disinterest with each other and the gap between jacobi’s chest and the other side of the bed is colder and more unforgiving than it used to seem. these days, it’s almost easy for jacobi to convince himself that the man he belongs to is  _ kepler, _ that the person to which he delivers orders and flat jokes and, sometimes, the threat of the gun stuck with a semblance of neatness into his waistband means nothing. and that’s jacobi’s life in a nutshell, isn’t it, the constant threat of a fatal explosion wrapped in a neat facade of  _ i got this; i have it together, _ tied with a bow and slipped to the nearest available target until they learn to trust him enough to let him inside all the wrong places. and then?

 

boom.

 

these days, eiffel doesn’t kiss the tips of jacobi’s shaking fingers, tell him that the ash and gunpowder whose smells linger in the dermis of his skin for so long that he’s afraid they’ll spill into his blood and replace his insides until he’s just  _ daniel jacobi: walking time bomb _ aren’t what define him, that they’re not there in spite of the person eiffel loves, that they’re a part of him, that he loves them too. and on those days, jacobi never had the heart to cry out to him, tell him he was wrong, that the explosives inside him would detonate, someday, and it would be too late for them then, too late to save the one of them that actually deserved the saving. and he knows that if he’d tried, eiffel would have played it off,  _ “well if you kill me then i’m sure as hell coming back as a ghost duck to haunt your ass,” _ and jacobi would protest,  _ “no, that’s not what i mean-- eiffel, i’m being serious--”  _ and eiffel would smirk and draw him closer, whisper sweet nothings and dirty promises against his spine until jacobi stopped pushing and gave in to the lightness. and jacobi knows eiffel isn’t stupid, isn’t ignorant or naive enough to think that they might actually get away with and get out of this alive, together. but maybe this is his own personal brand of coping, of hiding the pain behind the light, easy smile that had first caught daniel’s eye out of a room of six others. jacobi thinks he can understand. he is, after all, the urania’s own  _ sarcastic little ray  of sunshine _ .

 

but right now is neither of those types of days. today, this moment is hell in liquid concentrate. there’s a muted kind of agony throbbing away in the cavity of jacobi’s chest where he-- occasionally-- lets a heart form, and jacobi can do nothing but stubbornly push it away as he sits in a comms room that used to belong to  _ him _ . his finger rests lightly (but not  _ too _ lightly) on a button, and his ears are pricked and ready as he runs his mouth on the overhead speaker, but below the desk in the privacy of eiffel’s haven, his leg jiggles at the speed of sound, keeping pace with his thoughts as they dart to the urania, to  _ that room _ , not to kepler, but to  _ him _ , tied up, at kepler’s mercy, alone.

  
alone but for the broken body next to him.  _ doesn’t that sound familiar? _

**Author's Note:**

> don't know where this came from. catch me @ justasmalltownai on tumblr.


End file.
